Missing thunder already

THA GAVEL:

For all my wincing, it turns out that Joanna’s Ys is one of the strangest, saddest albums I’ve heard in a long time. Stay tuned for about 900 words on Monday, at least three of them expletives.

LIVING ON CENTRAL TIME, OR, WHEN I MISS NEW YORK, AM I NOSTALGIC FOR THE FUTURE?

I’m absolutely powerless to resist discourse on the level of Simon’s, re: “nostalgia” for the future. This has been an ongoing knot for me, from, well, lots of tawdry college papers, to an essay I wrote on Electric Light Orchestra about a year ago and am still quietly proud of in spite of its minor ugliness, to last week’s writing on the Boredoms, to my Yank love for Ghost Box.

Okay, well, I’d first say that what makes Ghost Box compelling is that its version of the future died a long time ago. Rather than “nostalgia for the future,” it’s “nostalgia for a backdated version of the future”; the disorientation comes, I think, with trying to reconcile those two worlds and not being able to. Like science fiction, it’s a win-win situation for the uncanny: if the past was right about the present (the then-future), then we’re spooked by its prescience; if it was wrong, then we have to re-experience a bygone ideal knowing that it flamed out. On the PBW currency exchange: it’s like looking at someone and thinking I used to love them and now I don’t; how did I ever? “Nostalgia” is itself a term that implies a rosying up of the cheeks, an inability to remember the pocks and pimples of something buried under memories. Ghost Box music feels quaint because we know that those myths never really came to fruition; Ghost Box music seems strange because there was a time that we went ahead with full faith as if they would.

Sez Simon of “futurism”: “what we’re really talking about is a future-now feeling, something that feels utterly of-the-moment and in that sense seems to be tilted to the future… but of course that futurity is very rapidly (sometimes almost instantly) turned into datedness, affixed as a period signifier … nothing dates faster than yesterday’s idea of the future….”

Now, when it comes to the future—pun breath—the things worth thinking about aren’t “what will this particular new version of the future look like,” but “in what ways does this future feel like older versions of the future.” Because in all versions of the future—in the Boredoms, in ELO, whatever—we deal with cumulative ideals about what the future could be; by being cumulative, we’re constantly invoking the greatest hits of the past. So Simon’s half-right, I think—nothing dates faster that yesterday’s idea of the future, but as time goes on, few ideas seem more bulletproof than the “vintage” futures. Think about it: the happiest science-fictions always involve a kind of prehistoric lack of clutter and restoration of airy humanism (the Boredoms). The aliens are always peaceful. The ideas of “connectedness” provided to us by economics or technology or whatever always have that ad-ready, vaguely neo-tribal undercurrent of “bringing people together.” ELO cobbled together a recent past (the 50s) with a distant one (classicism/romanticism) and tried to imagine a future that would end up echoing both.

Anyway, completely inconclusive, but now I’ve got to run and catch a plane to Charlottesville, Virginia, for my Very First Wedding. Glancing over the karaoke list, which the groom kindly sent me in advance, I’m preparing for my own therapeutic, retro-futurist moment: hoarsely shouting Ace of Base’s “The Sign” through a curtain of whiskey and, for once, trying to believe the words.